


Merope

by pprfaith



Series: Like the Greeks [4]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha Derek Hale, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Always Female Stiles Stilinski, Angst, BAMF Stiles, Blood, Dark, F/M, Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gore, How do I tag?, I can't believe I forgot the angst, I took season three and pulled it to pieces, Magic, Nightmares, No Nemeton, Pack, Psycho Peter, Spark Stiles Stilinski, Underage Sex, Violence, We love Peter, Yes we do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 08:42:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2541410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Honestly, all Stiles wanted was to live to see eighteen without serious bodily harm or, you know, death. </p><p>She has no idea when the hell that turned into the supernatural version of the <i>Hunger Games</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Merope

**Author's Note:**

> This is twice the length of the other installments and I still didn't put in everything I wanted to. Still, there's a lot in it, so this is kind of all over the place. I tried to tie up all kinds of loose ends without losing the main thread of the other stories and that turned out a bit messy, maybe? 
> 
> I feel like this has taken on a life of its own and the characters, especially Stiles, have moved far, far from canon. Apologies if she seems to apathetic.
> 
> Un-betaed.

+

Stiles keeps a list of all the things and people she’s lost. Mom is on it, and Scott and Allison and her faith, her innocence. On her darker days, she adds _humanity_ , only to scribble it out moments later and add it again soon after. The deputies Matt murdered, aunts and uncles she knew since diapers. The things Gerard took from her, the things she willingly killed the night she ended him. 

All the dreams she buried. 

She thought that was it. She thought, after Argent and the vampires, the hunters, the losses, they were done. 

She thought she’d get to keep what was left, her life, her pack, her family. 

She thought the kanima was the worst of it and that, somehow, things had to get better now. 

When the alpha pack didn’t show their faces for months and months, she honestly allowed herself to believe in happy endings. Just for a while. Just for the novelty of it. 

She should have known better.

“This,” she tells Derek, staring at the body strung up between two trees, throat slit, “is why we can’t have nice things.”

He laughs, choked off and half-wolf, but doesn’t actually disagree. 

+

After the vampires, life with her dad gets both easier and harder. 

She doesn’t have to lie anymore, can just say things like, “It’s a full moon, I won’t be home until late, buh-bye.” The scuff marks outside her window have stopped accumulating because, most of the time, everyone uses doors know, like they all have opposable thumbs, or something. She doesn’t have to hide bloody shirts and sheets stained by uncouth werewolves anymore. 

The list goes on.

Yay for all that.

The hard part is where the Sheriff keeps looking at her like he can’t decide of she’s the killer or the victim. Like he wants to lock her away to keep her safe from the monsters, but he’s afraid she’s already one of them. 

Bloody clothes from training and hickeys from Derek, both send him deeper into the bottle and Stiles tries so hard to be normal, to spend time with him and show him that everything’s okay, but whenever she thinks they’re getting back on an even keel, he’ll ask the one thing she can’t give.

He’ll ask her to stay away from the pack.

“I just want you safe, kiddo. Away from…,” he glances at the baseball bat in the corner, at the scar on her cheek, the hard look in her eyes. 

“Away from my pack,” she finishes because he won’t even use the word, will always hesitate and eventually settle for _friends_ like it leaves a bad taste in his mouth. Like she’s some dumb kid getting into drugs with a bunch of friends from the wrong side of the tracks. 

Which, she guesses, isn’t that far off, as far as analogies go, except she’s never been a dumb kid, not really. She does dumb things, but that’s not the same. And being a wolf is not a drug, not a choice. It’s who they are. And they’re not just random people, they’re pack. Family.

Okay… so maybe the drug thing is a really bad analogy. But the point is, Dad doesn’t get it.

“You’re not a wolf, Stiles.”

And, see, that’s funny, because every time he says that, she ends up fighting the urge to bare her teeth at him. 

So she walks away before they can scream again, sleeps at Derek’s, or sometimes Lydia’s, goes to school and then back home in time to scrape her father off the couch and send him, hungover, into work.

He pulls a double, gets called out as soon as he’s home, brings pizza as a peace offering and manages to start the whole song and dance all over again before she’s on the second piece.

Rinse. 

Repeat. 

The worst part is that Stiles gets it. He loves her. He only wants what’s best for her and he doesn’t think Derek and life among the monsters is it. 

He’s right, but that doesn’t mean Stiles hasn’t made her choice a long time ago. 

(Thing is, Derek once looked her in the eye and asked her to cut his arm off and instead of running away screaming, she cursed and raged and picked up the bone-saw and that was kind of it. All she wrote.)

+

It starts with Heather dead in the morgue. 

It starts with identical twins in Stiles’ homeroom and Erica flinching away from a burly man on Main Street, hissing like a scalded cat.

“He’s part of the pack that…” she doesn’t finish, just crawls into Boyd’s space and lets him pet her hair. 

Stiles remembers them in her bed, hollowed out, bloody and tired and whispering about how Derek wasn’t a good alpha, but he was better than what’s out there and so they came back. 

She never asked about what it took to get free of that other pack, but from the way Erica refuses to meet anyone’s gaze for the rest of the day, she can guess. 

So she does what she is best at: she makes lists. 

Curled into Derek’s side on the sofa, she chews pencils away to nothing and scribbles in the margins of her history essay. 

Heather wasn’t the first and she didn’t die by werewolf. 

The twins are watching and waiting, careful. Too careful to be here for wholesale slaughter. 

The big one – Ennis – was once a friend of Derek’s mother. Peter remembers him with a dark smile and a strange glint in his eye. He says Ennis is a brute, but not a violent one. Or he wasn’t, at least.

One of these things is not like the others.

“Peter!” Stiles yells up the partially finished stairs, “Get the books, we’re going researching!”

+

“Kiddo?”

Stiles looks up from where she’s cross-referencing three books stacked into her lap to find her father standing in the living-room doorway, still in his uniform. Peter makes a displeased sound at being disturbed and flicks a page too hard. Lydia beams at the Sheriff, mouth full of teeth. 

“Hello, sir,” she tells him. “We’re researching. I hope it’s alright we took over the room.”

Stiles looks around, winces a bit. It looks a little like a library exploded in here, which it sort of did. A few hours ago, there were five more people researching, but the puppies couldn’t sit still, so Stiles kicked them out. Derek had them running the border, last she heard. 

They left their books and notes wherever they landed though, and every surface is covered in paper of some sort. Peter is half buried under it, even though he still manages to look perfectly composed and poised, the asshole. 

So does Lydia, come to think of it. Only Stiles has approximately seven pencils stuck in her hair and ink smudged on her fingers from old, old pages.

“What’re you looking for?” Dad asks, nudging a book with his foot. It’s open on a woodcut showing a woman being eviscerated with a sacred blade of some sort. For being black and white, it’s kind of gruesome. 

Stiles shrugs. “Ritual human sacrifice.”

For the longest time, the Sheriff says nothing. Then he spins on his heel and walks out. “I’m ordering Chinese,” he calls from the hallway – an afterthought. “Who wants?”

+

Derek locks himself in his study with Erica and Boyd and comes out with all the information they can give him on the alpha pack.

He remembers Deucalion, fair and peaceful and with a vision. Stiles finds it kind of ironic that he’s the one that went blind. But then, this is the kind of cheap symbolism her life seems to be made of, these days. Men with vision going blind, monsters turning into literal monsters, a new family rebuilding an old house. 

Werewolves. How do you even. 

(Lists, she has no many lists inside her head that she never dares write down, for fear of never being able to stop laughing.)

Kali, Peter smirks about, dirty and wicked and no-one dares to ask. She’s half feral, Boyd says, claws and fangs all the time. She slots into place nicely next to psycho Duke, apparently. 

Ennis is muscle, big and brutish and easy to aim. 

The twins Ethan and Aiden are new. New and, Erica says in a quiet voice, not cruel. Vicious, deadly, violent. Not cruel.  
(Stiles remember Erica, frizzy and alone and hopeless. That Erica didn’t know the difference between viciousness and cruelty. She didn’t have to.)

They have no humans, no emissary, no ties to anything or anyone. They killed their alphas and then their packs and when they were red all over, Deucalion marked them his. 

Erica and Boyd stayed with them until they tried to convince them to murder Derek for them. Winner takes all. 

“Why wait so long?” Jackson asks. “You were gone for months.”

Boyd rolls his shoulders in a shrug. “They were watching. This pack wasn’t what they expected.”

They never are.

“So study first, then kill?” Stiles muses. “How very eight-year-old boy of them.”

Next to Jackson, Lydia closes her eyes and breathes in deeply. 

+

“Something is happening,” she confesses, later, in the safety of her bed, the pack’s human girls snuggled together under heaps and heaps of blankets, like puppies. 

Their wolves are rubbing off on them.

“Well, yeah,” Stiles allows, tugging on one ginger curl and grinning. She’s still not entirely over the fact that she gets to do this now, be Lydia Martin’s friend. Be her confidant. They’ve come a long way since Starbucks, longer still since Lydia pretended not to know her name. “The sharks are kind of circling. If, you know, werewolves weren’t mammals and had three rows of teeth, which, wow, that’d be scary. Can you imagine Frenching a shark?”

The other girl shakes her head, lips quirking in a grin. “It’s more than that. Stiles, I think someone’s going to die.”

Stiles stops playing with Lydia’s hair, picks up her hand to squeeze instead. “Let’s hope it’ll be the bad guys,” she whispers and holds on until they’re both asleep, their wolves running patrols at the edge of town, howling into the darkness. 

+

Stiles’ first run-in with the alpha pack happens three days later. She’s waiting for Scott to get out of practice when the wonder twins corner her behind the locker rooms, matching sinister smirks in place. 

It’s creepy as fuck and also weird, because Stiles has this Pavlovian response to red eyes at this point and that’s just wrong. So wrong.

“Did you get lost on the way to the Creeper’s Club Meeting? Cuz I can give you directions. Take a left and then go fuck yourselves.”

She smirks because it’s better than panic and fishes around her bag for something to draw, scratch or carve runes with. She comes up empty. 

Screw her Dad, after this she’s getting ink. Fire on one wrist, Protection on the other. It’s not like she’s refined, or anything. Shield and sword. 

She lent her last pen to Isaac during econ. 

“So you’re the alpha’s mate,” one of them – she thinks it might be the smarmy, straight one - says. He keeps trying to hit on Lydia like she’s that easy.

Stiles shrugs, waves a little and wonders if her bitten-down nails are enough to scratch runes into her skin. 

“We heard you’re the one who killed the old Argent. You don’t look that tough.”

That’s right, Gerard was the one who blinded Deucalion, wasn’t he?

“He touched my stuff,” she answers, flatly. The reference flies right of Evil One’s head, but Evil Two, hanging back, sort of snorts a little. She cocks her hip and hopes that someone’s going to come by soon. There’s currently four werewolves on the field just on the other side of the building. Did they all turn off their super hearing, or something? “If your boss man wants a demonstration on how I did it, I’ve got my bat in my car.”

Evil Two shakes his head. “We’ll pass it on. Actually, we’ve got a message from Duke.”

Just for little old her? Oh, dear.

They smirk in eerie sync. “It’s Hale we want. Omega to alpha to the one who beat the Argents, all in under six months. That’s impressive.”

“And all he has to do is kill his pack, right? That’s how this works.” 

They shrug, unimpressed.

“I’m not hearing a message, there.” 

Evil One snaps his teeth at her. Evil Two pushes him aside. “You’re human. Your death means nothing. You’re useless in terms of power, not even a beta. Deucalion is willing to let you walk away. You, the other human. Just walk away. Let wolves deal with wolves.”

He leans in close as he says it, close enough that she can see where he missed a spot shaving. He smiles, and it’s almost sweet on that baby face. Or it would be, if not for the red eyes and the fangs. She only just finished getting the occasional flashback to Peter’s mad alpha red, Jesus Christ. She foresees nightmares in her immediate future. Red ones.

Stiles wants to close her eyes. She wants her bat. She wants to set him on fucking fire and watch him burn, for talking about her pack like they’re nothing, just batteries for the alpha, talking about her like she’s worthless. Talking about them all like their deaths are foregone conclusions. 

And the worst thing, the very worst thing, is that it doesn’t read as arrogance on him. It’s just fact. Around the alpha pack, that’s just how people die. Fast, defenceless, almost casual. 

All fall down. 

He rears back, suddenly, startling her so badly she jumps. Then he slams one arm into the brick wall behind her head, his fist sending dust and shrapnel flying every which way. Stiles feels her cheek and neck start to burn hotly even as she fights her flight instincts with everything she’s got. 

Never run from a wolf. 

“Run, little girl,” he tells her, perfectly pleasant. His twin laughs at the stench of her fear.

The next moment they’re gone. 

+

Scott takes one look at her, at the hollowness of her eyes and the panic stench on her skin, the way she’s barely holding back an attack, and digs her keys out of her jeans. He drives her out to Derek’s house, arm resting around her shoulders the whole time, holding her close. Protecting her. Once there, he helps her out of the car, hands back the keys and presses a kiss to her forehead. 

“Call me. Whatever is going on, I’m helping.”

By the time Derek comes racing down the porch, he’s already taken off into the woods and Stiles finds herself breathing a bit easier. 

Sometimes, just sometimes, Scott reminds her of the little boy she loved so much, the kind and earnest kid who traded lunches with her and held her while she sobbed after Mom died. He didn’t always understand her, that boy, but he stuck with her anyway, the same way she stuck with him.

They’ve unlearned that kind of loyalty, she thinks, as she finally lets the panic take her and stumbles into Derek’s arms. 

He catches her, throws her bag over one shoulder and carries her inside and upstairs, where the bedrooms are taking shape. He puts her in the centre of their bed and then wraps himself systematically around her. 

Protecting. 

Guarding.

He doesn’t speak, just rests his head on her chest and tangles and tugs at the pack bonds in her chest. He pulls at them until they’re wide open, until she drowns in Alpha.

Like this, she can hear the rhythm the wolves move to all the time. His heartbeat. 

Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum. Perfectly calm. Perfectly steady. 

Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum.

She’s not alone. She can breathe. She’s safe. 

Ba-bum.

He’s here and he will murder and die for her. All of them will. Her wolves. Her pups. Her pack. 

Ba-bum. 

Peter nudges at her from miles and miles away, fire and playfulness, ashes and madness, and she can feel the others, clumsily reaching, not quite sure what’s happening, or how the bonds work, but there. 

They’re there.

Stiles settles, lets the fear drain out of her, locks that feeling of utter helplessness away in the dark, where it belongs. (They last time she felt like this was in a dark basement and she swore herself never again. Never again.)

“The twins have made their move,” she tells her alpha, quiet and almost steady. “They told me to take Lydia and run, because they have no interest in us. We’re only human. Our deaths wouldn’t give you power. But the others…”

She leaves the rest unspoken. _But the others have to die at your hand, if you want to live._

There is a small part, a tiny, tiny fragment of her, that whispers that maybe, Derek should do it. There are five alphas pitched against their newborn pack, each stronger than their strongest. It didn’t seem so bad, until two of them cornered her like she was a mouse, prey, perfectly helpless, and casually told her that everyone she loves will die. Like it was nothing to them. Like it was easy. 

At least this way, Derek would live. 

She dropkicks that part into the farthest corner of her mind as she feels Derek smile against her collarbone, teeth hard against bone. “Merciful,” he remarks, derision heavy in his voice. 

He looks up, chin set on her breastbone and smirks, eyes red. “Sounds to me like they want you out of the way. Sounds to me,” he tells her, “like you have something Deucalion fears.”

She tries to hold on to that.

+

Isaac is the next to get a friendly visit. Ennis breaks his spine just because he can and leaves him on the pack’s doorstep, like a cat leaving a dead mouse. They find him scrabbling at the door like a kitten, lungs too bruised to do more than gasp, eyes screwed shut in pain. 

Derek _snarls_ as he opens the door, as he cradles his beta and the boy makes helpless noises of pain. Stiles can hear bones grind with every step Derek takes. Erica, standing behind her, wraps her arms around her waist and buries her face in Stiles’ neck so she doesn’t have to see. Lydia and Jackson clear off the sofa as fast as they can, eyes wide and faces pale.

Even through the agony, Isaac gasps, “He said you have to… you have to kill us.”

Derek’s eyes glow red death.

“It’s intimidation,” Peter murmurs, later, a hand on Isaac’s ankle, sucking down his pain. The rest of the pack is wrapped around their injured, soothing, healing, protecting. “Telling the betas instead of Derek what Derek must do to survive. But only after offering the humans a free pass.” His eyes are killer blue. Kill the wolves, save the humans. “They want us afraid of our alpha. And to prove a point, they delivered the message in a way to make it clear Derek has no option but to comply.”

The man in question is pacing a few feet away, grinding his teeth and flashing claws and redred eyes, still, like he’ll never be calm again, never be human again.

“Either Derek kills everyone, or he dies with us,” Jackson sums up. He sounds scared. Jackson didn’t even sound scared with they killed him.

\+ 

When Stiles dreamed of strolling through the halls of BHHS with someone popular on her arm, that person was usually Lydia, not Jackson, and the stares that followed them were awed, not flabbergasted. 

Goes to show that life is never what you expect it to be. 

Jackson’s arm is firmly slung over Stiles’ shoulders, Lydia’s hand in his free one. She steers and they follow, the rest of the pack, minus Derek and Peter, trailing behind. No-one goes anywhere alone anymore, by alpha decree. 

“You know I’ll be just fine five feet away from you, right?” Stiles asks, idly, as the tall boy tugs her sideways after his girlfriend. 

He growls lowly under his breath, a warning. “Jackson,” she says, sternly. 

He outright snarls at her. “You don’t heal,” he bites out. “You can kick ass, I know, but you don’t heal. We can’t…” he pulls her tighter, squeezes Lydia’s hand hard enough to make her glower back at him. He’d have her all wrapped up, too, but Stiles is pretty sure his fear of Lydia in a snit is bigger than his fear of the alpha pack. So he’s latched onto her instead. 

Isaac pushes closer, his front against Stiles’ back. Erica and Boyd are cuddling while walking. 

They’re scared. They’re all scared because Derek made them gods, made them monsters, and suddenly, they feel human again. Vulnerable. 

Stiles, who has never stopped knowing how breakable she is, exchanges looks with the only other non-wolf in the pack. Lydia meets her gaze evenly, knowingly. It’s funny, how they got used to the fear, the racing hearts, the knowledge that a single slip from any of the people around them is enough to kill them. 

The puppies tend to think they’re immortal. Lydia and Stiles have the scars to remind them otherwise, every single day. 

“Alright,” she tells Jackson, feels him relax marginally. “We’ll be good girls and stick with the big, bad wolves, okay?”

Isaac snuffles a little laugh into her neck and Jackson’s death grip on Lydia’ hand loosens.

“Whatever, freak,” he mutters. 

The only time he lets either of the girls out of his sight is when they go to the bathroom. 

Erica follows them there. 

+

There is glass under her feet and blood in her mouth, a bat in her hand and the sound of broken bones grinding against each other in her ears. 

Wolves howl in the distance and then stop, choking into nothing. The silence is deafening. 

Fire licks at her skin and Gerard looms over her, tall as a building, simpering, “It’s admirable, really, such loyalty. It’s unfortunate that you have picked a pack of dogs to give it to.”

His fist buries itself in her abdomen, his claws slit Derek’s throat. Shadows climbs off the walls, lapping up the blood from his wound. He gurgles, reaches for her as he dies. 

Around them, the bodies of the pack lie, still and pale, bled out. 

“Run,” Ethan says, his face a mockery of humanity.

“Yes,” Boyd’s corpse agrees in his usual, even tones, “run. It’s not like you were any help here.”

Peter, a box of matches in hand, sits up. His heart has been ripped out. He offers the matches to her with a grotesque smile. Blood is smeared around his fangs. “Come on then, I know you can do it.”

Stiles takes the matches. 

She wakes screaming. 

She wakes screaming and Daddy is there, his arms tight around her, and she thinks of basements and the smell of dying old men, kicks, punches, screams. 

When she comes fully to, the Sheriff is clutching a bleeding nose and carefully keeping his distance. He only creeps closer when he’s sure she’s back, puts a hand on her shoulder, soothing and careful and like she didn’t just punch him in the face hard enough to draw blood. 

“It’s okay, baby girl, you’re fine, you’re okay. Just a nightmare. You’re okay now, there’s nothing here. Just breathe. Just breathe, good girl.”

Eventually, she exhales.

“What did you dream about?” he asks, tissues wadded under his nose. 

“Monsters,” Stiles answers. Every time she closes her eyes, she can see her own hands holding a box full of matches and all her friends are dead. 

+

Fire on one wrist, Protection on the other. 

She draws them with slow, painstaking care and renews them after every shower.

+

Lydia and Erica go shopping. They come back with hollow eyes and broken ribs for Erica. Lydia has a ring of bruises dancing around her neck. It matches her purple dress. 

Both of them look smaller than they are, and the whole pack hates it. 

“Kali,” Lydia explains, darkly. Erica snarls, holding her ribs. Injuries inflicted by an alpha heal more slowly than regular ones. 

She’s still tender the next morning. Every time someone at school gets too close to her, or the rest of the pack, she growls or outright snarls, wide-eyed and a bit crazy around the edges. She, Stiles, and Jackson share third period with the twins. The second the blonde lays eyes on them, she goes full out wolf, eyes and fangs and claws, and Stiles has to stick a finger down her throat and puke up her breakfast to distract everyone long enough for Jackson to get her out. 

The twins slouch in their seats and don’t even bother trying to hide their laughter. 

+

Scott finds her on her way to lunch and pulls her quickly and quietly into the new English teacher’s empty class room. 

“Spill,” he says, his mouth hard and his eyes worried. He looks older than seventeen. God, when did her goofball of a friend grow up? When, between all the blood and death, did the little boy from her memories finally disappear?

Stiles looks away, fiddles with a stack of loose papers on Ms Blake’s desk. Heather’s obit comes slipping out, fluttering to the ground like a feather.

“The short version? There’s a pack of alphas in town that are trying to force Derek to kill his whole pack and join them. They like… extreme methods of encouragement. Also, ritual sacrifices, but that’s another kettle of shit.”

Jazz hands. Heather’s face smiles up at them from the ground. 

(That’s how most of Stiles’ nightmares start.)

For a moment, Scott stares at her, blank-faced, like the information simply doesn’t compute. “They… Derek is supposed to kill you guys?”

She nods. 

“That’s fucked up.”

“They beat Isaac half to death last week, just for kicks. You gotta stay the hell away from them, Scott.”

He bites his lip, thinking hard, but nodding along. “Yeah,” he finally says, “yeah. That’s probably why there’s hunters in town.”

“What?!”

“Allison called to give me a heads up. There’s a bunch of hunters passing through. You know, checking up on things. It’s probably because of all those murders? I don’t know.”

“And you didn’t tell us?!”

“She only told me a couple of days ago, Stiles. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Stiles wants to cry. She wants to drop her bag, sit in that corner over there, rock herself a little and have a good, long cry. Because on top of the alpha pack, some crazy witch wannabe, problems with her dad, school, her own magic, Lydia’s ongoing mystery of ‘what am I’ and, oh yeah, the threat of _all of them dying_ , there are now hunters. 

Again.

She’s done.

She is so fucking done it’s not even funny anymore. Just. Done. There is only so much shit that can be piled on a seventeen-year-old girl and that line has just been reached and obliterated. It’s too much. 

She’s not even panicking anymore, just standing there, and thinking, “I want to cry.”

That. Done. 

But Scott is still staring at her like he did when they were kids (so long ago, it seems), running wild and he always trusted her to get him back out of the trouble she also got him into. 

“How can I help?” he asks.

And somehow, somewhere deep down, beyond the crippling, breath taking fear, Stiles finds enough strength to not break down sobbing.

“Keep your head down, keep your phone close and don’t be caught alone with the twins,” she tells him, darting in for a quick hug. Scott does the best hugs. 

Then she turns to leave.

“What are you going to do?” he wants to know and she swallows a hysterical giggle long enough to answer, “I’m going to see a twin about some hunters. And then I’ll cry.”

She waves as she goes. 

+

Here is a list of stupid things Stiles does: she runs with wolves, she gives her back to Peter, she drives without a seatbelt on, she eats greasy food, does her homework at three am and she never, ever runs when she should. 

New addition: she makes chummy with two alphas who have made it their declared goal to see her entire pack dead. And also scare the shit out of her. 

Life choices. Perhaps Dad is right and she needs to look at hers. 

Ethan, the gay one, is a hair shorter than Aiden, chuckles at Stiles’ pop culture references and generally seems less of a monster than his brother. Like, he’s a seven on the hostile monster scale and Aiden is at least an eight. She finds him wrapped around Danny and grins, bopping them both on the shoulder with a brofist. 

“Hey, guys,” she chirps, her best impression of the manic pixie dream girl. Danny sighs. 

She is the kind of person that makes the nicest guy in town sigh in resignation. She’s not sure whether to be proud or hurt. 

“What’s up, Stiles?”

She shrugs. “Actually, I need to borrow your boy toy for a sec, if that’s cool.” Peter keeps telling her not to bother with lies if they aren’t necessary, so she makes no excuses. 

Danny frowns, but Ethan stands, disentangling himself. “Aiden?” he asks.

She shakes her head, because, no, she definitely doesn’t need Creeper Number One around for this. He’d probably rip her head off on principle. Not that Derek isn’t going to do that anyway when he finds out what she’s doing, but. 

Stiles doesn’t need to be saved. She does her own saving and this is how, even if she’s all lit up with nerves and probably stinks of fear. She’s the brain. She thinks. This is smart. 

She keeps the mantra up in her head.

“Just you, thanks a lot. Your brother is creepy.”

He smiles, pleased, and lets her lead the way to the edge of the school grounds, completely unafraid that she’s drawing him into a trap. She’d call it cocky, but she’s pretty sure he can back it up. 

“Soooo,” she finally hedges when they’re well out of earshot of everything and everyone. 

He crosses his arms over his chest, biceps bulging, and waits. “Yes?”

“I’ve got a warning for you.”

“Are you threatening me?”

Grunting in annoyance, she repeats, “Warning. Not threat. Did I say threat? I didn’t say threat. Look, there’s hunters coming to town. Checking up on shit, I guess. If we keep chasing each other all across town,” – not that there’s much chasing on the Hale pack’s part, they mostly just run and hide -, “we’ll draw attention and no-one wants that. So here’s a heads up. Hunters in town. Lay low, or we’re all fucked.”

The big bad wolf looks surprised. She’s not sure if it’s her warning or the hunters themselves, but she has her suspicions. 

“You want me to pass that on to Deucalion?”

She shrugs. “By all means. Or, hey, here’s an idea, paint him in blood and send him walking down Main. It’d solve all our problems and we could all go home!”

That actually earns her a snort, before she drops the jokes and shakes her head. “Like I said, we don’t need attention. At all. A fight with hunters in this town would mean another war.”

He nods, then asks, “You do realize that we’ll kill them, right?”

Does she? Yeah. Does she care? Maybe, someday soon, when she’s done being afraid for her own life and those of the people she loves, yeah. Right now? All she needs is for them to not make more trouble and to find an hour for that cry. She really needs that cry. 

Still, giving Ethan information that will get people killed is one thing. Admitting it out loud? She’s not quite monster enough for that. Not yet. Hopefully not ever. 

So she gives him a little finger wave and jogs to make it to English before the bell. Ms Blake is kind of a stickler for punctuality and she kind of has it in for Stiles, for some odd reason.

+

Seven more bodies show up in short succession.

Three of them match the ritual murders so far, beaten, strangled, and with a slit throat. Lydia is the one who finds them, hanging like ornaments from one of the largest trees in the forest. 

She calls first Stiles (because your father is the Sheriff, Stiles, come _on_ ) and then Jackson and Derek in that order. 

By the time Stiles gets there, the boys are already trying to find whatever scent there may be left of the killer. Like before, there is nothing there, except an overwhelming stench of rot and death. Stiles barely has time to check that, yes, three kinds of death, before there are police sirens in the distance and they book it out of there. 

Nine hours later, when Derek finally packs her off home, telling her she can’t research with her eyes falling shut every other minute, her Dad is in the kitchen, drinking. He’s pale, still in his uniform hours after his shift ended, and he looks so, so angry. 

“Dad?”

He gives her a long, hard look. It’s the look he gave her when he arrested her and Scott for stealing police property. The disappointed, _furious_ one. With the hand not wrapped around his glass, he taps the beige file in front of him, wordlessly inviting her over.

Testing her, in some way. 

Stiles takes a deep breath and says, in a normal voice, without really thinking about it, “Derek.”

She hears the front door creak open a moment later. He’s at her back as she steps forward and flicks the file around, reads over her shoulders as she flips it open. Her dad glowers, but says nothing, just keeps nursing his glass. Inside the file are pictures of a car crash. Dark SUV, tinted windows, four men, middle-aged from the looks of it. A trunk full of weapons, some of them archaic. Hunters. 

All four of them DOA. Death by car crash, ruled by the Seattle ME.

“Seattle? What are you doing with a car crash from Seattle?” Her voice is perfectly steady. There was a time when Stiles couldn’t lie to save her life. 

(This, too, goes on the List of Lost Things.)

Dad, who is in a staring contest with Derek, snorts. “You tell me.”

“Dad?”

“Those are hunters, Stiles. They fit everything you’ve told me to watch out for.”

She keeps scanning the pages. Going too fast, tree, goodbye. Nothing that points toward werewolves, unless you consider that maybe, maybe the car didn’t simply lose traction.

“But this happened in another state, Dad. What does it have to do with us?”

The reaction is instantaneous and she can feel Derek tensing at her back, his fingers hooking into the belt loops of her jeans, ready to pull her out of the line of fire. Ready to protect her from her own father. Her father, who slams his glass down, jumps to his feet and pounds both fists into the table. 

“Because they were here!!” he screams. “Two days ago, those exact hunters were here, in this town, asking me for directions! And now they’re dead!”

And he thinks they killed them. Stiles feels sick. Derek pushes until their positions are reversed and he’s covering her. “We had nothing to do with them,” he says, calmly, quietly. That’s the voice he uses to talk Isaac down when he freaks out. “We didn’t even know there were hunters in town. I swear to you, sir, on my pack’s lives, that we did not kill those men.”

There is a tense moment of silence while the men stare each other down. Finally the Sheriff nods and subsides, just a little. He’s relieved, Stiles thinks. Then he turns to her, an expectant expression on his face and damn him, damn him for knowing that Derek may speak for the pack, but not for her. Damn him, for making her lie to his face. 

So she tries not to. “I have never met those men in my life,” she says, and it’s the truth. 

(She signed their death warrants blindly, without care. List of people she killed: Mom, Peter, Gerard, a bunch of vampires, four hunters.)

Then, before she breaks down, she turns on her heel, marching up the stairs. Halfway, she stops just long enough to call down, “I’m sleeping at Derek’s.”

Because her father just looked at her like she was a monster. He looked at her like he was a monster and he wasn’t wrong. She can’t look him in the eye. Tonight, Stiles can’t look her father in the eye because he’s a good man, a kind man and there is a monster living under his roof. She can’t keep doing this to him, can’t keep smiling and pretending her older boyfriend is the only issue between them, not when he’s seen her threaten torture casual as can be, not when he’s spent the past year suspecting her of all kinds of murder and, most of the time, wasn’t actually wrong. 

That’s the thing. He suspects her of horrible things and he’s not wrong. 

When she comes back downstairs, they are both waiting for her in the living room, standing awkwardly across from each other. Derek’s expression is pinched, like he’s smelling something sour, and she knows that he knows. Her dad just looks broken.

“Stiles,” he says, “Stiles, honey, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have…”

But he should have. He was right to. “I know, Dad. I just…,” she shakes her head. “Try not to drink anymore tonight, okay? You know it’s not good for you.”

She smiles. He smiles back. 

Derek takes her away.

+

“You had something to do with this,” Derek says, in the safety of his car, perfectly calm and collected, except for the way his claws are threatening to poke holes into the steering wheel. 

“I told the twins there were hunters in town, too.” Because she did tell Derek as well. Just… after the problem was already taken care of.

“You warned the alpha pack about the hunters?!” There come the fangs. He flashes angry eyes at her, deep red and _dangerous_.

“I warned Ethan,” she corrects, “which is not the same.” Because, out of the five of them, Ethan is the only one who sometimes hesitates and Stiles is nothing if not good at sniffing out weakness. Ethan hesitates and Aiden follows his brother. It’s worth a gamble. “And none of us needed the attention, so them laying low was good for all of us.”

“Except,” he snaps, “they didn’t exactly lay low, did they?”

No. They didn’t. 

“I’m the pack’s enforcer,” she says, aware that she’s being defensive, that she’s trying to justify her own actions, but. “It’s my job to deal with threats to the pack and I did. I just… outsourced the solution to the enemy?”

That gets her a fond snort as his claws flow back into blunt, human fingers. He stretches them, lets the knuckles crack and then extends his right arm, slings it around her and pulls her as close as she can get with the seatbelt on. He presses his nose into her hair and inhales deeply. “Jesus fuck, Stiles. Jesus fuck.”

And all Stiles can do is giggle, a bit hysterically, because that just about sums it up. 

+

Peter is at the house when they arrive, lounging around the living room like he doesn’t have a worry in the world. He’s reading Hemingway, too. 

Stiles yawns a hello at him and then lets Derek bundle her into bed. He undresses her, kisses her, hands wandering, and they have mind blowing sex because sex with a werewolf built like a Greek god is always awesome, even when everything else sucks.

Afterwards, she pulls him down on top of her, lets him ground her, his weight and breadth and solidity. She cards her fingers through the hair at the back of his neck and he just breathes quietly into the skin of her neck, in and out. 

They don’t talk.

Sometimes, with Derek, Stiles can simply not talk and it’s amazing. 

Eventually, Derek falls asleep and she untangles herself from him, finds her panties and his Henley and makes her way downstairs, where Peter is still reading. She plucks his book from his hands and he sits up, grinning smarmily and asks, “Does my nephew not satisfy?”

As if he didn’t hear every second of them fucking. Stiles throws his book at him and he catches it in time for her to reach out and dig her nails into his neck, just for a second, just a little.

A reminder. Human, yes, teenage girl, yes, but not a push over. Not submissive. Not ever and not to him. He gives a low whine at the back of his throat and it’s enough to drain the fight right out of her, throat bared so prettily.

She slumps on the sofa next to him, leaning her head against his shoulder. “I told the alphas about the hunters passing through,” she whispers, quietly. “They killed them. Four people, just dead. And this time, no-one can say it was self-defence.”

Peter leans back, pulling her along until they’re mostly lying, touching from shoulder to knee. “One can, however, say that you weren’t the one who killed them.”

True. Also worthless. “I set up the board. I knew what was going to happen.”

 _I didn’t care._ She beat a man to death and didn’t care. She set a burn victim on fire and didn’t care. When all this started, she overheard Scott trying to explain her to Allison once. “Stiles cares,” he told the hunter, “but only for the people she loves. Everyone else can go to hell.”

She laughed then, because that’s pretty much her in a nutshell, but a year and a lot of ugly choices later it’s probably time to face the music. Stiles Stilinski is not a good person. And she’d like to pretend the monsters made her into this, but she’s always been.

“Does that make me a monster?” she asks the only man she knows won’t lie to her. The only person she’s ever met who spits his own madness in the face and doesn’t care what his deeds make him. 

The only one she can be certain won’t ask her why she’s sitting here, at three in the morning, silently crying. He just lets her soak his t-shirt like he doesn’t give a damn. 

After a long while, when she’s already cried herself out and almost fallen asleep, he asks, “Does it matter? As long as you can live with your choices, does it matter what they turn you into?”

And then, when she doesn’t answer, he adds, “You’re the most terrifying wolf I have ever met, Little Red.”

And that’s neither praise nor curse. It just is.

+

In the morning, Stiles wakes in bed, Derek’s arm around her waist and too sweet Starbucks coffee on the nightstand, which is Peter’s way of telling her it’ll be okay. Either that, or he’s trying to poison her.

“Your uncle is weird,” Stiles mutters into her pillow, remembering the first time Peter came to her with coffee. He complimented her on the way she’d killed him, then. 

Derek snores and doesn’t wake. 

+

“Stiles?” Scott is panting, obviously out of breath as he calls and Stiles has flashbacks to his asthma days, when he’d call her in the middle of an attack to ask her where he’d put his inhaler. 

“Scott? What’s up? Where are you? Did something happen?” Even as she’s firing off questions, she’s already on her way to the door, keys in hand. Derek, who doesn’t leave her alone if he can help it, these days, comes shooting out of the kitchen, one arm already in his jacket.

Every call an emergency. Welcome to Beacon Hills. 

Scott takes a deep breath and manages some answers. “Hospital,” he rasps. “Kali was waiting for us after practice. Jackson… just come quickly.”

+

Apparently, Scott not being part of the pack doesn’t count for shit. Under his zipped jacket, his shirt is a bloody mess, torn to ribbons. Jackson is worse. Jackson is, despite being a fucking _werewolf_ , still in ICU. 

It’s bad. Melissa comes breezing through the waiting room, handing Scott a stack of clean clothes to hide the fact that he should be in a bed, too, and tells them that she’s doing everything to hide Jackson’s condition, but, “He’s barely healing. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was human. What the hell is going on here, guys?”

Stiles smiles at the woman and grabs Scott, drags him into an empty closet and helps him strip. His chest is so much raw meat, but there are bandages hidden between the scrubs his mom brought him and it’s enough. He’ll heal. He’ll be okay.

She dresses his wounds and then him, hugs him until he grunts in pain and then forbids him from dying. “You may not be pack, but I’m still the alpha bitch and you are not allowed to croak, get it?”

He laughs. Maybe he cries a little, too, but Stiles won’t tell. Instead she drags him back into the waiting room, where the rest of the pack has arrived and turned into a big, multi-limbed pile. She draws Scott into the middle and even though Boyd and Erica balk a little, they slip their hands under his shirt to touch. To help, even if it’s less effective than if he were pack. 

Scott tenses, relaxes. 

When he’s just about boneless, Derek grabs him by the scruff and turns him, face to face. “Tell me what happened,” he orders, eyes flashing just a little. 

Scott tenses, relaxes. He talks. 

“We were late out of the showers because Coach held us back to talk some things through. Boyd and Isaac went ahead, I guess? She was waiting for us. Told us that we would die, that we didn’t stand a chance. All kinds of shit. Said Argent wasn’t going to protect me for long, that Derek would put me down because that’s what happens to omegas. Told Jackson he was useless. Just… trash talk, you know? He lost control, attacked. I… I couldn’t just leave. I mean, he’s an ass, but, fuck, you know?”

Stiles knows. Scott has always been a hero, damn idiot. 

“So you jumped in.”

He nods. “Yeah. Yeah. I got her on the neck, eventually. Not a killing blow, but she took off. I didn’t… Coach showed up. He called the ambulance. I couldn’t… I was afraid he’d die. He looked really bad.”

Derek nods, running a hand over Scott’s hair, over and over. “You did good,” he said, “You did good, Scott. Thank you for protecting a member of my pack.”

Scott nods, not really hearing. He’s still half in shock. Stiles hugs everyone as close as she can.

They wait.

+

Midnight hospital coffee sucks.

It sucks so badly it’s almost good again, burning down her throat like acid, waking her up. She drinks, curses quietly under her breath and jumps as a hand lands on her shoulder.

She twitches away, whirls around, ready to run, when she realizes it’s only Ms Blake. Her teacher is looking at her with worried eyes. “Are you alright?” she asks.

Stiles nods. “Yeah, sure. I’m… it’s cool. Just… coffee.”

She grapples for the rest of the pack, checks in on them on reflex, finds them fine, fine, fine. Jackson is sleeping. She breathes. 

Stiles does a lot of breathing these days. 

Ms Blake smiles. “I heard about Jackson. I came to see if there was anything I could do, but I see he’s got enough friends here to keep him safe.”

Huh. That’s… kind, and also weird for a new teacher who only has Jackson in one class.

“Good night, Stiles,” the woman tells her, friendly, easy, the way Coach is with his students, the kids he’s been training for years, four days a week. “Tell the others not to bother with tomorrow’s homework. I can tell none of you are going home tonight.”

She squeezes Stiles’ shoulder again. Her hand feels too heavy.

+

Sometime after three am, when everyone else is asleep, Scott with his head in her lap, Stiles quietly pulls out her phone and sends a text. 

+

“It’s a fivefold sacrifice. Five times three threefold deaths. Druidic ritual.” Peter looks up from the book he’s clutching in both hands. “We’re dealing with a darach.”

“Gesundheit,” Stiles offers. 

+

“Listen,” a voice behind her says and Stiles stumbles into the nearest locker, hands already fumbling for the pepper spray she keeps on her _at all fucking times_ , for all the good it does. 

She knew going to the bathroom thirty seconds before the bell was a bad idea. Now she’s alone. With the killer twins. 

It’s like in a horror film, where the dumb co-ed in the skimpy underwear turns around way too slow and finds her killer right behind her, knife in hand, grinning like fucking Chucky. Except she’s wearing jeans and one of Derek’s Henley’s and she’s not blonde.

Also, these dudes don’t need knives to shish-kebab her. 

But she still _feels_ like that dumb co-ed as she turns around, slowly, slowly, to face the twins. 

Twin. 

Singular. 

It’s only one of them, and the nicer one from what she can tell. Or hopes. Yeah, it’s mostly hope. She remember the last time they ambushed her and really wishes she didn’t. 

“All ears?” she offers, far too late for it to come across as chipper rather than pants-pissing terrified. But then he can hear her heartbeat and smell the sour fear-smell on her, so, whatever. Spilled milk. 

He doesn’t do anything as conspicuous as looking around for eavesdroppers, but he does step forward and into her space. “We owe you,” he says, almost too low for her to hear.

“Who’s we?”

Pack or twins?

Because a favour from the psycho pack? Yeah, she could go in for that. But her luck isn’t that good. On the other hand, the twins moving as a unit apart from the rest of the pack? Her hunch about them paying off, even in the most miniscule of ways? She’ll take it. Gods and monsters, she’ll fucking take it. 

Ethan cocks an eyebrow, smirks with teeth just a little too sharp. “Me and Aiden. So listen.” 

Okay, now he actually does look around. Stiles isn’t sure she wants to know what comes next. 

“You should store away your precious things. Safely.”

And before she can ask what the _hell_ that’s supposed to mean, he’s gone.

She doesn’t bother trying to come up with an excuse for Harris. She just books it to the house.

+

“Are you sure that’s all he said?” Derek asks, pacing in a dizzying pattern across the living room. 

Stiles rolls her eyes. “Nope. He said way more, but I’m not telling.”

He snaps his teeth at her and she snaps right back, making Peter laugh from where he’s leaning against the wall, all casual asshole fashion statement. 

With a headshake, she rubs at her temples. “More research, I guess. We’ll figure it out. We always do, right?”

Because between someone sacrificing people in threes, the alpha pack taking pot shots at her pack, Lydia finding nine out of ten dead bodies, and the trouble with her dad, there is so much time for an additional mystery. Really. She slumps into the sofa, suddenly drained. 

Derek stops his pacing in front of her, their knees bumping as he studies her face. Eventually, he holds out a hand. “Come on. I’ll drive you back to school. You can’t afford missing any more days.”

+

Somehow, Stiles’ life has become a movie with the transitions cut out. It’s one meaningful conversation after another, interspersed with action scenes, and none of it makes sense, because there’s no connection, only the same actors, over and over, fighting for their lives. 

One moment she’s talking to the less evil twin, the next she’s brainstorming with the last two Hales, then she’s back at school, sitting in English, listening to Ms Blake prattle on. 

“Revenge,” she says, “is a prevalent motif in a lot of literature. Who can give me an example?”

“Harry Potter,” some stoner pipes up in the last row. When everyone looks at him funny, he shrugs. “What? Voldemort is totally avenging his nose and you know it!”

“The Count of Monte Cristo,” Lydia interrupts, before it can grow into a full blown rant. There are dark rings under her eyes, but her lips are twisted in perfect, royal cruelty and Stiles loves that girl, she does.

The teacher grins, pleased. “Exactly. Now, both Dantes - and Voldemort, if you want – turn themselves into a kind of monster to achieve what they want. Do you think that’s acceptable?”

She looks straight at Stiles as she asks, and the question is weird, too, because Ms Blake believes in non-guiding questions and that kind of shit. Still, Stiles shrugs. 

“Sometimes,” she says, unbidden, with Lydia’s and Scott’s gazes heavy on her back, “You have to make yourself into the monster to kill the monster, right?”

The teacher looks inexplicably pleased, even as she slams them with a three page essay on a literary work focused on revenge. “And it can’t be Monte Cristo,” she adds, smiling evilly. 

Stiles is going to write about Kronos’ revenge in the Percy Jackson series. That’ll be her revenge. 

+

She’s still riding high on that little plan for fun when she walks out of the school building after the last period and finds her jeep right where Derek left it for her, but with the driver’s door open, like someone forgot to close it. Locking the jeep isn’t really a thing, since it’s old and the back consists of a flap of fabric, but it’s unspoken law that no-one touches Stilinski’s jeep. 

Because it’s worth shit, she’s she Sheriff’s daughter and, lately, that psycho Hale’s girl. So the car being unlocked is a common occurrence, especially with how many people drive it. 

The doors being left open, less so. Jackson comes to a halt at her elbow, critical gaze on her heap of beloved junk. He’s more careful since he was released from the hospital, moving like every step takes concentration. 

Moving like he’s afraid. 

“Derek was here,” he says, sniffing the air in that oh so subtle way he has. 

“He drove me,” she explains, feeling Erica and Boyd close in from her other side. Isaac follows, then Lydia. For a moment, they all stand there, staring at the open door like the freaks they are. The Isaac twitches his nose and starts growling, a sub-vocal, continuous sound. 

“I smell blood.”

Across the lot, the twins are standing, watching. Stiles sneers at them. “Can you track it?”

They’re all sniffling now, but it’s Erica who points. “Across the street.” 

Into the treeline. 

Taking a deep breath, Stiles grabs for her phone, fires a text off at Peter. The answer comes promptly. _I haven’t seen him._

“Jacks, Isaac. Go to the house, trackback here through the woods. Drop Lyds at home on the way. Erica, Boyd, we’re starting here and working the other way around. If Derek’s hurt, he’s heading for the house. If they got him, this is still the most likely route for us to find anything on.”

She expects someone to complain as she sends Peter another text, telling him to check up on her dad and try to reach Derek’s phone while they search. Nothing comes, except Lydia straightening. “You don’t need to drop me off,” she states, and when Jackson opens his mouth to try and tell her differently, she adds, “I’m coming.”

Stiles hugs her, quick and hard, and then they throw their bags into the cars and set off on foot, running into the woods, and fuck what the rest of the school thinks.

They spread, wolves on either side of her, looping to make up for her human speed. If that is what it is. Even at an easy jog, she feels faster than she has before. The pack bonds bleeding through, perhaps, or her strict refusal to lose anyone. 

She tries to listen inside while she runs, to feel for that tether that keeps her and Derek together, but all she gets is a vague sense of direction. Direction and pain. A few yards away, Erica gives a low whine and takes a sharp left. Stiles moves to follow, because the shewolf’s obviously found something, but Boyd beats her to it, scooping her up as he passes her and then falling into a sprint to catch up with his girlfriend. 

Derek is hurt. 

He snarls at them, viciously feral, eyes red and fangs and claws on full display, like a cornered animal. He is, in a way; wedged between two fallen logs, where he obviously dragged himself because both his legs are mangled beyond recognition. Stiles swallows bile as she fights out of Boyd’s arms and crouches low.

“Derek,” she whispers, and her voice is steady, damnit, it’s steady. “Derek.”

She offers him her hand, her scent, her strength, shoving everything she has at him through the packbonds and trying not to think of the implications of their alpha, their strongest, hiding in the woods like prey, broken and bloody. 

He latches onto both, after a moment, her body and her power, pulls her into his chest, heedless of the pain it has to cause him, and buries his face in her belly. She kneels, awkwardly, in the dirt, torso twisted to accommodate him, arms wrapped around his skull, cradling as well as she can. 

She hears someone talk and then Erica is slotting herself in place behind her alpha, supporting, giving. Boyd wraps Stiles up, his hands on Derek’s arms. Careful, so careful, to keep away from his throat. 

And then there’s Jackson’s clammy hands and Isaac’s steady ones, Lydia’s small ones and Derek whines as his bones realign, but stays still, so still. 

+

Stiles wakes to the feeling of eyes on her and finds Peter lingering in the doorway of Derek’s and her bedroom, arms crossed, watching. She’s sent the rest of the pack out once Derek was as healed as they could get him, the urge to guard him from potential usurpers welling up and demanding she protect her alpha before all else. 

They went, but not far, dragging the mattresses from the living room upstairs. They’re camped out on the floor between the bed and the half-finished closet now, curled together, Lydia at their centre like she’s always been there, backs carefully turned on their weakened alpha and his enforcer.

Only Peter is awake. Only Peter dares stare at Derek in contemplation. 

“That was a final warning,” he muses, almost too low to hear, and draws closer until he’s sitting on Derek’s side of the bed, reaching out. Stiles is tense as a bowstring on his other side, ready to move. It’s instinct, deeper than reason. _Defend._

Peter knows it, too, moves slowly. Harmlessly. His hand trails up his nephew’s arm, reassuring, warm. Friendly. 

Fingertips graze his shoulder, his cheekbones, then down. Stiles’s own hand shoots out a split second before he makes contact with Derek’s neck, digging her nails into the older man’s wrist.

Her other hand is already raised, fire rune glowing hot. 

The threat is clear. Touch him and you burn. 

Again. 

Peter smiles, not fighting her hold in the least, content to stay, their hands tangled above their alpha, Stiles a second away from burning him. He twists his fingers to turn her hold on him into a handshake, like he meant to do that all along.

“I would make you a queen,” he says, conversationally. All it would take is letting him kill her boyfriend. 

“You would be dead,” she returns, rune flickering with power. 

He chuckles as he takes back his hand. “You turned out well, Little Red.”

He stands and starts stripping, tucking himself into the space between Boyd and the wall, as far from the bed as he can get. He tucks his limbs into the gaps left by the pack and closes his eyes. 

For tonight, he’s done playing and Stiles, Stiles feels like she passed some kind of test, just now. 

When she finally falls asleep again, Stiles dreams she’s sitting on a throne made of her pack’s corpses, with Peter’s naked skull cackling at her. 

“Sometimes,” his lipless mouth declares, “you have to turn yourself into a monster to kill the monster.”

When she looks down at her hands, they’re on fire.

+

Silvergirl274@gmail.com has sent her an e-mail with an attachment. 

It consists of dozens of pages of scanned police reports and newspaper articles, as well as handwritten notes, detailing the rise and fall of a man who once called himself Duke and his pack of orphan alphas. 

The vision, the trap, the poison, Kali and Ennis, their crusade across the continent, finding packs they deemed weak and offering the one who kills them a place in their pack.

Most of the time, they kill the wolf that comes to them, eyes newly red, themselves, for one reason or another. 

The twins have only been with them for a few months and maybe that’s why Stiles isn’t as pants-pissing terrified of them as she is the others. They’re not quite as bugfuck crazy. Yet. She finds herself hoping they never will be, but it’s an abstract hope, one she doesn’t have much time for. If they want to break free, that’s their business. She’s got her hands full saving her own wolves. 

There are reports about domestic abuse, about two boys who kept turning up to school beaten black and blue. Omegas, Stiles thinks, chewing on a pencil. And not the way Isaac is theirs, protected and cherished, but beaten and degraded, the least, instead of just the last.

She almost understands why they took Deucalion up on his offer. 

Revenge. It’s becoming a theme. 

She doesn’t read the e-mail proper until she’s done digging through the entire attachment, printing it, colour-coding it. Then, and only then, does she read what the other girl wrote. 

_I’m sorry for what happened_ , it reads. No excuses, no defence, no explanation or even an acknowledgement what she’s sorry for. 

Stiles takes her phone, pulls up a conversation thread with an unknown number that she started the night they spent at the hospital, scared and exhausted to the bone. _What do you know about the alpha pack?_

_I’ll check_ , is the answer. _Look after Scott._

_Always._

And then today, _check your e-mail._

 _Thank you,_ she texts back and, armed with a stack of papers, makes her way to meet with the pack. 

+

“This came from Argent?” Derek asks, dark scowl on his face. It’s been three days since his run in with Ennis at the school and he still looks wan. 

Stiles nods, slouches between Jackson and Erica. “Yep.”

“You asked for help from her?” He spits the last word like the swear word it is. Argent. Kate, Allison, Victoria, history repeating itself and this pack bleeding for it. 

“We needed information,” Stiles fires back. “We need _something_ , because the only other option is locking ourselves up tight and hoping that’ll keep us safe and… fucking hell!”

“What?!”

“Locking things up. Safely.” She scrambles over Erica’s lap, making grabby hands for her trusty, battered laptop. Boyd passes it over when it becomes clear what she wants. She flips it open on Jackson’s stomach and starts typing furiously, blowing up Google search after Google search and rambling on all the while. 

“Locking things up, that’s what the less creepy creeper said. That I should lock up my things. Safely. Where do you lock up shit, guys? Come on? You lock it in a safe. Safely. But this isn’t about things at all, this is like me, thinking I should lock you all in a safe, but not a small one, no way sir, but a big one. Like a bank vault.”

She flips the screen so they can all see the article she’s pulled up, about the only bank heist ever pulled in Beacon Hills and how the bank closed in the wake of it.

The pack stares, silently, half at her, half at the screen. 

She huffs, looking to Lydia and then to Peter, but they still look mostly blank. With a groan, Stiles nudges them along. “Can a back vault hold a werewolf, do you think?”

Realization dawns on the face around her and Lydia snorts, loudly. “Your leaps of logic are insane,” she comments and Stiles preens. 

“Adderall, baby,” she says, fully aware that this time it was a compliment, but usually it isn’t. 

(Also, she’s missed the last four doses, she’s fairly sure, and anyway, the drug doesn’t do for her what it used to.) 

“So there’s a werewolf in that vault? Why should we care?” Isaac asks, leaning back against Boyd’s legs.

“Because it’s someone precious to us,” Lydia explains. “A werewolf we care about.”

“All werewolves I care about are in this room,” Erica says, flat out. Scott isn’t here, but she doesn’t like Scott, so there’s that. Besides, Stiles’s bestie was perfectly fine when they saw him a few hours ago. The cryptic tip-off is over a week old, at this point. It’s not Scott. 

“Then who?”

All eyes turn to Peter and Derek because, let’s be honest, if anyone knows more werewolves, it’s them. 

They shake their heads, no answer at the ready. Everyone they knew is dead. 

“It’s probably a trap,” Lydia says, primly. 

“Ethan took a risk, telling me,” Stiles defends. 

“Part of the trap.”

“What if it isn’t?”

“We don’t know who, if anyone, is in there. Why should we care?”

“Exactly. It’d be a shitty trap. You bait a trap with something you know your prey wants. Not with random wolves you plucked off the street.”

“We should go,” Erica suddenly interrupts the brewing fight. Boyd nods agreement.

“Why?” Derek wants to know. 

“Because even if it’s just some random wolf, it’s still… it’s still someone trapped by the alphas and I…,” she’s been there, she doesn’t say. Boyd and her got away – were let go, Stiles suspects – but someone else might not be as lucky. 

Someone else might still need saving. 

But why us? She doesn’t ask. She’s not good at empathy. Anyone who’s not pack, or her dad or Scott might as well jump off a cliff. Stiles doesn’t really give a fuck about a random wolf. 

That’s why she’s the enforcer. That’s why Peter backs down when she tells him to. That’s why her father looks at her like she’s a stranger and it’s why she keeps dreaming of herself with matches in hand, standing in a world on fire. 

She kept a list, for a long time, titled Why Stiles Isn’t a Good Person.

On it were things like how she doesn’t mind lying and how the news of war and famine leave her cold, how she laughs when people have gruesome accidents and never cleans up her own messes. 

The main reason, though, the one she never dared put to paper, goes like this: Stiles isn’t a good person because she simply doesn’t care. 

But her pack does. 

Derek nods. “Then we get them out.”

+

It’s Saturday morning and the house is full of sleeping werewolves when Stiles goes wandering. Her ADHD and the meds have never made for a particularly regular sleeping rhythm and when she worries, sleep is out of the question anyway.

She untangles herself from Isaac, who crawled into bed with them sometime between Derek screwing her boneless and now, grabs the first set of boxers and t-shirt she finds and pads out into the morning twilight. 

It’s Derek she finds, for once, instead of Peter, who’s the usual victim of her insomnia. The alpha is sitting on the reading spot on the back porch railing, the one he made sure to restore exactly as it once was, for his mother’s ghost, or maybe for Stiles. She never dares to ask. 

She leans into his side, steals his coffee, takes a small sip. 

“You okay?”

“Lydia called,” he confesses, and she can tell it freaks him out, that Lydia called him directly for anything. “She says she keeps waking up screaming.”

Their research still hasn’t yielded any results, but they’ve learned to take the redhead seriously when there is death involved. 

Stiles shakes her head, hands back the mug. “We’ll deal with it,” she assures, quietly. Upstairs, she can hear Isaac stumbling around, sleep-drunk and cold without his bed mates. A door slams and silence falls. Apparently, he’s found a new snuggle buddy. 

Derek puts down his coffee, slings an arm around her waist and hauls her up to sit in the V of his legs, their feet tangled together. 

Stiles bares her neck and he buries his face in her skin, breathing. They both close their eyes. 

+

They wait until the next full moon, hoping that the alphas will be busy elsewhere. 

Jackson, whose control is still poor when he’s away from Lydia, stays outside with the humans, leaving the rest of the wolves to break into the abandoned bank’s basement. Scott is with them.

Stiles is nervous, so, with one eye on the pack bonds, she fiddles with her phone, playing piano tiles until her finger hurt, googling the bank again, googling the vault, built in the early 1900s, made out of hecatolite and… something that sounds a lot like alarm claxons goes off in her head at that. 

Hecatolite. She read something about that, in one of Peter’s books. 

She types the mineral in the search bar, scrolls through the results and then starts running.

“Stiles!” Lydia shouts, so Stiles flings her phone at the other girl and keeps going. Behind her, the redhead curses and then she and Jackson follow.

“Don’t open it!” Stiles bellows, as soon as she clears the door, sprinting for the stairs. “Don’t open the vault! Derek, don’t!”

She skids down the stairs and around a corner just in time for a roar to shatter her eardrums and something small and fast and rabid to come rushing straight at her.

Jackson bowls her over a split second before the feral wolf does, rolling them both out of the way. Erica flattens Lydia into the wall and the wolf is gone, up the stairs. 

There is a moment of complete stillness while Stiles realizes just how close she just got to disembowelment. 

Then they’re all up and scrambling after the wolf. “Hecatolite,” Stiles explains, for those who care. “It blocks moonlight and thus the transformation. That guy hasn’t shifted in… months, probably.”

“Girl,” Derek corrects. “It’s a girl. It’s…,” his eyes are wide and shocked and not red but human greenish blue. “Stiles, that’s Cora.”

“Co…, your _sister_?”

He nods, dumbstruck. His little sister is alive. Alive and feral and somehow involved with the alphas. Something precious that was taken from him. Stiles is getting Harry Potter vibes, here. 

She giggles, a bit hysterically. 

Lydia swats at her head. “Wonderful. Celebrate later. We just unleashed a feral werewolf on the town.”

“We need to herd her into the woods,” Peter agrees. “Keep her there until she regains control. And keep out of the alphas’ way while we’re at it.”

It’s Erica who says what everyone else is thinking. “And if we can’t?”

Then they kill her. And probably get killed themselves, either by the alphas, or the hunters that will come down on them if they let her loose on the town. Stiles shoves at the blonde’s shoulders. “Let’s go.” 

+

The wolves fan wide with the intent to herd, the humans following in the jeep, armed against the alphas and, even if no-one wants to say it, Cora Hale. 

Since the car is stuck on service roads, they’re mostly there because they refused to be left behind, catching only the occasional glimpse of something humanoid streaking through the trees.

It’s eerie. There’s over a dozen werewolves in these woods, yet the silence is absolute. Anything prey has hidden itself away from the apex predators, and those don’t make a sound. 

Not until Erica materializes in the jeep’s headlights, blonde and red, clutching her belly where it’s torn open, barely staying on her feet. Her face is human and pale, streaked with dirt. 

Stiles stomps on the brakes so hard she can feel the entire car protest and scrambles out of her seat. By the time she makes it to Erica’s side, the girl has already collapsed. 

Stiles slams onto her knees, searching the other girl for wounds even as she shoves energy at her like she did at Derek only a few weeks ago, pushing, pushing, pushing, willing the other girl, her beta, her pack, to heal, to be strong, to _survive_.

Erica stops her roaming hands with one of her own, squeezes. “Boyd,” she gasps, her eyes wide and terrified, the way they were the first time she climbed through Stiles’ window, the way they were when she was human and helpless and had given up all hope of a future because of her illness. There is blood at the corners of her mouth and now that her hands aren’t covering it, Stiles can see the red ruin of her stomach. “Kali. He told me… to run. Help….”

Help me. Help him. Help. 

Stiles will never know. 

Erica is dead and Lydia opens her mouth and screams, screams so loud and so long that Stiles thinks she’ll never hear anything else again, except that scream and the terrifying silence after, where Erica’s laughter should be. 

She leaves the girl, leaves her body in the muck, because Erica would want her to help Boyd, would want her to move, to fight, to live. She grabs Lydia’s hand and the two of them run like Hansel and Gretel, lost in the woods, until Lydia suddenly takes the lead, her steps gaining certainty as they zero in on a small clearing.

They stop at the treeline and Lydia takes a deep breath.

Boyd is pinned to a sturdy old oak by a branch through his chest, like a butterfly, like a discarded toy left in the yard to rot, like something worthless and broken and this time when Lydia screams, Stiles opens her mouth and adds her own voice to the mix. 

Blood still drips from his open mouth, but his eyes are cloudy already and Stiles screams and screams and screams. 

“I was wrong,” Peter murmurs, his voice grating like nails on a chalkboard, later, while Isaac and Derek work their packmate’s body free. “This is the final warning.”

Stiles remembers, suddenly, viscerally, a similar scene, months ago, where she and Derek stood in the woods, just like this, staring at the body of a stranger, strung up between trees. 

“This is why we can’t have nice things,” she said. 

Here, now, throat raw and chest too tight, she can feel bile rising in her throat.

In the distance, a wolf howls, triumphant and gleeful.

+

They bury the bodies in the pack’s favourite clearing, side by side, the way they would have wanted. (As if that matters, anymore. Erica and Boyd will never want anything again.)

Derek says something, but Stiles can’t hear him over the rushing of blood in her ears. Beside her, Lydia is pale as a ghost, barely able to stand, throat raw to the point that every breath seems to hurt her. Isaac clings to Stiles like a child, sobbing, and she lets him, lets the grief rip through her like a rabid animal, lets her jaw clench and her heart race with _hate_. 

Stiles is good at hot, burning rage. But she is better at this, at the cold and precision of crystalized hate. She thought she couldn’t hate anyone more than she hated Gerard, than the vampire who dragged her father into this life while, simultaneously, taking him away from her forever. 

She thought that was all the hate she was capable of, slow murder with ice in her veins. 

She was wrong. 

She was wrong because slow murder is not enough for this, for the alpha pack, for Deucalion. She wants them all to burn. She wants them to _scream_.

For taking away Erica’s chance to see the world, to live, to finally enjoy being alive after suffering under the weight of her illness all her life. For stopping Boyd before he ever found that spark Stiles always saw in him, that capacity for amazing things.

For murdering two children, only seventeen, whose only crime was wanting to live better lives. 

For that, she hates. 

Cora is knocked out and trussed up a few feet away and Stiles can’t help but blame the girl, somehow. The only reason they were out here….

She clenches her hands into fists, feels the runes at her wrists spark, even as the cold settles in her guts to stay.

They mark the grave with a heavy rock and no names. 

+

“Stiles,” he dad says over breakfast, or is it dinner? It’s the first meal they’ve had together in weeks, in any case. Stiles looks up from her plate of eggs, attempts a smile. 

She gives up when his expression grows alarmed. 

“Erica Reyes and Vernon Boyd have gone missing again. Do you know where they are, kiddo?”

It’s weird, because it’s been three days and she’s gone to school and done her chores and made all kinds of plans, but this is the first time she cries. 

“Stiles?”

He keeps asking what she knows and she keeps squeezing her fork tighter and just. Cries. Her eggs are getting soggy and half of that is her tears, dripping onto the plate like this is a damn movie, dramatic cut to a close-up of the ruined dinner-breakfast, but it’s not. It’s not a damn movie and no-one’s getting back to their feet after the credits have rolled, no-one is washing off the corn syrup blood while laughing at the cheesy lines. 

This is life, it’s Stiles’ life and Erica and Boyd are no longer in it and she cries in her fucking undercooked eggs because she can’t fucking stand it. 

She can’t. 

Dad gives up eventually, with that look on his face that says he’s not just giving up, he’s giving up and lets her slink away into the night, plate swimming with her tears.

The next day, he and his deputies pull the whole pack out of classes to question them. No-one says a word.

“Damnit it, kid,” the sheriff yells, after fifteen minutes of talking in circles. “I can’t help if you don’t let me!”

“You’re right,” Stiles says, and it hurts, doing this, but she keeps dreaming of monsters and matches in her hands and she has to. “You can’t help.”

+

Late that night, three healers die and there is no more time to look for repeat-offender runaway kids. 

+

“I swear,” Ethan hisses, low and urgent, eyes blood shot, “I swear we didn’t know.”

That it was a trap. That Cora was bait and murder the goal, that Duke set them all up and Erica and Boyd…

Isaac punches the other wolf before Stiles can, hauls back and flat out nails him in the face with a sickening crunch of bone and cartilage.

Less Evil goes down with a grunt, a hand pressed to his bleeding nose and Stiles is pulled behind Jackson and Scott, still grappling for words. 

Ethan nods after a moment, climbs back to his feet. He licks his own blood off his hand, face already healed. 

“We never wanted this,” he says, as quiet as his sort-of-apology for two dead packmates. “Aiden and I… we didn’t sign up for this.”

And that might mean _sorry_ , might mean _please save us_ , might mean _can’t go back now_. 

Whatever it is, Stiles just shrugs and turns, making her way to class without a word. 

+

“Stiles,” Lydia says, and Stiles thinks, weirdly, that if Dad sounded like that, she would tell him anything he wanted to know, but he doesn’t. Lydia does. “You have a plan,” she goes on.

“Yeah.”

“I want in,” the redhead declares and Stiles looks at her, really looks, and finds only fire and determination there.

“Cool,” she says.

+

“Jenny,” Stiles says, walking into the English classroom with a swagger in her step that she doesn’t really feel.

She perches on a desk in the front row just as Lydia flicks the lock on the door and Ms Blake closes the file she was going through. 

“I can call you Jenny, right?” she adds, mock-sincere.

“Stiles,” the teacher says, “Lydia.” She looks surprised, a bit unsure. It’s not a bad act, really, Stiles can admit that. Her own acting skills consist of _deflect, deflect, deflect, now run_. “I’m not sure what you’re doing here? School let out hours ago.”

“Oh,” Stiles waves a hand, shares a smirk with Lydia, who is leaning against the door, playing with her nails like she’s bored. “We’re not here about school. We’re here about you. The way you keep popping up wherever I go, like the hospital? Yeah, that. And Heather’s obit on your desk, a full week after arriving in town. And the way you keep talking about revenge. And you get that look on your face, that’s just….” She shakes herself out of her rant. “It took me a while to figure it out. You arrived within a few day of the alpha pack, almost like you were tracking them. Seemed weird. And then the killings started and it confused the hell out of us. Short of powering a nuke, _why_ would anyone need that much power? But you _do_ want to power a nuke, don’t you?”

And then drop it on top of fucking Deucalion and his little posse of murderers and scum. Stiles approves.

“Stiles,” Lydia sighs. _Get on with it._

The darach sneers, the act of Ms Blake, high school teacher, dropping away. “What are you going to do about it?” she bites, face twisting into something… unnatural.

Stiles shrugs. “You want the alpha pack dead. So do I. So you and me? We’re going to make a deal.”

The darach stands, shoving her chair back, leaning across her desk to hiss at Stiles, “And what would I possibly need you for, little human? You can’t even protect your own pack. What use would you be against the alphas?”

Well. She knows where to hit, gotta give her that. Far, far below the belt. 

Stiles brings up her left arm, shield rune blazing, expanding in a protective circle until it slams into the other woman and rams her into the nearest wall, hard enough to lift her off her feet. It’s like telekinesis, but cooler. 

“Your fivefold knot takes time. You need more people, more bodies, more everything. It’ll be weeks before you can make your move and until then, well.” She shrugs, aw-shucks, so sorry.

Lydia has tensed up by the door, following Stiles’ train of thought, even if the darach isn’t yet. Following it and not liking where it leads, because Stiles didn’t tell her this part. Whoops. 

Stiles ignores her, reaches out for bonds that aren’t there anymore, Boyd’s calm, Erica’s stubbornness, and holds the older woman up against the wall like a fly. “But here I am, all juiced up. Being a darach cost you access to a lot of magic. Access that I still have, because I’m all good and pure and shit.”

“Are you offering yourself up as a battery?” is the incredulous question when the bitch finally catches on, her sneer twisting into something like genuine surprise. 

Stiles drops her like a hot potato. “I have raw power but no way to aim it. You have the aim, but no power. If I’m right, you were part of one of the packs the alphas slaughtered, and in losing your pack, you lost most of your powers. That’s why you’re such a wreck, why you need the knot. You’re weak. But you can do what I can’t. So yeah, I’ll be your fucking battery, as long as you swear to me, on blood and magic, that you will kill every. Last. Alpha.”

She emphasizes the last words with a step each, until they’re nose to nose and Stiles puts every bit of conviction, every bit of grief, puts her dead mother and her broken father, Gerard’s corpse and Peter’s screams, Issac’s and Derek’s blood and pain and helplessness, Erica’s plea for help and Boyd’s shattered body, puts it all into her eyes and stares straight into the dark, polluted gaze of the darach, offering up her soul. 

She’s tired of losing people.

(Lost Things: Mom, Dad, faith, innocence, childhood, Scott, Allison, dreams, peace, Erica, Boyd, hope)

“Stiles,” Lydia starts, quiet and afraid and shocked. Stiles ignores her. 

“Alright,” the older woman says. 

+

Cora and Stiles are alone exactly once, in the kitchen of the rebuilt house, where Stiles is pretending to cook.

The wolf comes slinking in, silent and dark-eyed, the way Derek isn’t anymore, most days, and watches the other girl chop up carrots for long minutes. 

“Why did you come back?” Stiles asks, eventually, because she hates silence and Derek told her about South America, about a pack Cora calls family. 

The werewolf shrugs. “I heard the Hale pack was rising again and I wanted to look, to see for myself.” She sounds disappointed.

“That Hale pack is rising.”

A snort. “No. There is a pack and it has two Hales in it, but that’s it.” She snags a sliver of carrot, bites into it with a loud crack. “There’s nothing here,” she concludes, standing to leave. 

“Cora?” Stiles calls, when she’s almost out the door already. 

“Yeah?”

“Be kinder,” she tells the younger girl.

“What?”

She swipes the back of her hand over her forehead, puts down the knife. “When you tell Derek and Peter you’re leaving, be kinder. It’s not their fault.”

The derisive bark of laughter says otherwise, but Cora bites her lip and simply nods. 

After that, they don’t talk again. 

+

“You know,” the darach offers, conversationally, after they’ve plotted out their course of action, their plan of attack. Lydia helped, dismayed, angry and terrified, utterly unbudging. She helped. 

But she’s gone now, to cry herself to sleep in Jackson’s arms and all that’s left is two emissaries, one left for dead, one willing to become it, two girl with magic in their veins, in over their head and out for blood. 

(Things that Repeat: everything)

“I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Not all monsters have fangs,” Stiles counters, smirking nastily. “You should know that, Jenny.”

There is a slight pause, a spark of something like respect. “Call me Julia,” the – Julia says. 

Stiles nods. 

+

“This is why we can’t have nice things,” Stiles mutters, bitter in a way she didn’t expect to be until she was fifty, at least. 

But then she probably won’t make it to fifty, so there’s that. 

They’re standing in front of an empty warehouse, waiting, waiting, waiting. 

Inside, Stiles can feel five hearts beating in dissonance, five lives moving like nothing’s wrong. Like the world didn’t end on the last full moon with two deep graves in the woods.

Outside, so far, there is only her and Julia, who quietly starts chanting under her breath, one hand reaching out to lock onto Stiles’s wrist and then the pull starts. 

Stiles, with her sharpie runes scrubbed off until her skin looked red and raw, feels abruptly dizzy. Biting down on her tongue, she fights the urge to fight the feeling, letting the older woman drain her dry. All she does instead is slam shut the gates that lead to her wolves, the bonds of power and family that tie them together. 

The darach can’t have them. 

Behind them, tires screech and that’s Lydia pulling through, bringing the pack, bringing manpower, soon enough to fight, but not soon enough to stop her. 

Derek skids to a halt in front of her, snarling already, eyes so red. He moves to rip her away from Julia, who simply lets go, laughing out loud. 

“Too late,” she crows, keeping up the pull even without contact, taking, taking, taking. She moves forward, bindings falling from her lips, slowing the alphas down, hindering their change, dulling their senses. Curses that won’t outlast the hour. Long enough. 

First wave.

Stiles sways and looks at her alpha, boyfriend, lover, mate, leader, wolf. Her Derek. 

She puts a careful hand to his ridged, stubbly face and orders, “I levelled the playing field. Use it.”

He wants to argue. Hell, he wants to grab her and run away with her. But he won’t. Because they’ve been in this together from the start and there has always been an unspoken rule between them. They accept each other’s sacrifices and do what is necessary to survive. 

That, and Erica and Boyd were his before they ever were hers and his wolf rages for retribution.

He nods.

Second wave. 

“Scott, Jackson,” he snaps, gravel in his voice his gaze still fixed on Stiles, his hands keeping her upright as her insides drain from her body. “Guard her. Lydia, stay back.”

And then he kicks the doors off their hinges and storms into the warehouse, darach by his side, pack following after.

Peter throws a sloppy salute at Stiles before running to catch up and Stiles moves on rubber knees after everyone else because there is a range to Julia’s spell. 

“Stiles,” Scott whines, pleading and angry at the same time. 

She grins at him and leans into Jackson to keep from falling, her focus on setting on foot in front of the other as her vision turns spotty and her heart starts racing, sweat beading on her forehead and vertigo slamming into her.

They reach the doors.

Inside, chaos reigns. 

The pack – and it feels wrong to use that word when there are two of them missing – is tag teaming, Derek and Peter against the twins, Isaac and Cora against Ennis. 

Julia is firing pure energy at Kali and Deucalion, keeping them both at bay while she spits her grievances at them, the losses she suffered, the pain she endured, the agony she want to repay. 

“I am going to kill you,” she informs them, almost politely, her disfigured face twisted into pure hate.

Stiles feels every single spell she throws and gasps, clutching her middle. “Faster,” she calls, loud enough for the former emissary to hear, and then lets the boys crowd her to one side and against the wall, where she has to lock her knees just to keep standing, feeling ravenous and emptied out, sick and hungry and half-gone already. All that power, and she’s just letting it go. 

Until now, the alphas always surprised them, ambushed them, used guerrilla tactics and fear against them. But here, now, the Hale pack is like a wounded, cornered animal and Stiles lets Julia have everything she is, because they cannot lose. 

Duke tries to circle the darach and Scott jumps in long enough to block him, exposing Stiles, snarling, and then they’re trading blows, just as a cry of triumph goes up from Cora, who is riding Ennis to the ground, her claws gouging holes into his massive shoulders. 

Peter and Derek keep the twins apart, keep battering them, and blood keeps flying. Somehow, the Hales are keeping the two alphas on their toes, helped along by Julia’s bindings and their own rage. Lydia, armed with more fire bombs, helps too, providing a distraction whenever things get too hot for their own.

When Cora calls her name, she takes a few steps away from Jackson and Stiles and throws hard, setting Ennis’ prone body on fire before he can heal. He dies screaming.

Cora shies away from the fire. One of her legs is shattered and Isaac, howling in triumph, backs her into a corner, guarding her as she heals. 

Julia flings Kali into a wall, a dagger suddenly in each hand and she pounces, keeping the wolf immobile with reserves of powers Stiles didn’t know she had. Her vision keeps narrowing, like a tunnel going down.

Scott is still playing keep-away with Deucalion and one twin goes down under Peter’s ruthless assault, wounded badly enough to be unable to avoid the former alpha coming down on him, shattering most of his ribcage under his weight.

He screams and Stiles feels a brief flicker of pity at the thought of one twin dying, leaving the other behind. But then the other one – Ethan, Aiden? – falls to his knees, hands in the air, neck bared, and Derek - 

\- Derek stops. 

“We submit,” the twin yells over the din. “We submit, please, my brother.”

His desperation sounds real and Stiles thinks _we never wanted this_ turned out to mean _please save us_ after all. 

“Derek,” she whispers, and she thinks she means to say more, but it’s hard to focus. She doesn’t even know if he hears her. 

“Peter,” he orders, and the beta nods, staying right where he is – keeping the one twin from healing, grinding his knees into broken bone. Ensuring compliance from the other one. 

Kali dies under Julia’s daggers and then they all turn on Deucalion, who has flung Scott from him like a rag doll, to land at Stiles’ feet, bloody and hurt. Jackson makes a moue of distaste, but grabs the other boy and drags him closer anyway, behind himself, to safety. Lydia, run out of bombs, crouches next to him, cursing and holding his insides in. 

Derek and Julia converge on Deucalion. 

There’s blood dripping from Derek’s brow and he moves funny, but the flare of his death-red eyes isn’t even close to dimming and Julia has long, deep scratches on both arms, but she holds her daggers steady as she lunges, muttering under her breath.

Stiles can’t hear her, but she can feel the magic anyway, knows the other woman is giving herself strength, speed, endurance. By taking it from her opponent. Crafty bitch. 

Derek follows her in, landing a hit before the Demon Wolf twists away, fucking nimble for a blind guy. He breaks the darach’s arm with an audible snap and then uses it to shove her away from him before spinning to wait out Derek, who’s gone back to circling. 

Damn it. Damn it, damn it, Julia was supposed to take Duke down with her. 

“Jacks,” Stiles barks, or as close as she can get when she’s seeing everything double and while the wolf launches himself past her at the alpha’s exposed back, Stiles totters after him, scraping together what strength she has left and drawing her staple – fire – in Scott’s blood on her palm. 

She only has one shot at this and she has to make it count. Her knees are shaking.

Jackson goes flying but lands on his feet and as he runs forward again, Derek charges, splitting Deucalion’s attention in two.

And Stiles makes three. 

She aims and fires, literally, setting the blind wolf’s clothing on… well, fire. 

It’s not much, nothing like the blazes she usually conjures, but it costs the Demon Wolf a second and that costs him everything. 

Julia is back on her feet, broken arm cradled to her chest, dagger aimed for blood. 

She strikes just as Stiles’ fire dies, as Jackson impacts, as Derek goes for the neck. 

Stiles hits the hard concrete on her knees, panting like she ran a marathon and the darach goes down only fifteen feet away, most of her chest a red ruin. Jackson rolls and regains his feet after his hit and Derek.

Derek stands over the other alpha’s bleeding body, chest heaving, shoulders tensed and watches him struggle for breath. When Deucalion makes to move, he puts a foot square on his chest and shoves him back down, crouching low enough to snarl at the older man and then he reaches down and finishes it with a sickening crack of bone.

Silence. 

For a heartbeat, two, three, there is complete and utter silence, broken only by the breathing of the winning side. 

Cora and Isaac in one corner, Scott and Lydia in another, Peter and the twins, Jackson, Derek and Stiles. 

_It’s over._.

Almost.

Julia lies where she fell, a few feet from the dead Demon Wolf. She’s flat on her back, breathing laboured and blood pumping, pumping, pumping. Out of her body and onto the dirty floor. 

She’s done. The alphas she hated, the ones that turned her into what she is, are dead, one by her own hand. 

But she’s a darach and there are nine dead people inside of her and Stiles knows this won’t kill her. 

She’ll heal.

But there are nine dead people inside of her.

So Stiles drags herself forward onto all four and as Derek throws his head back and finally roars his victory, his revenge, his survival, as the others join in until the cacophony is deafening, she crawls over to the other woman.

Julia, Jennifer, Jenny. Darach, emissary, druid, monster, packmate, survivor. 

If the dice had rolled differently, if Gerard had been smarter or the vampires faster, if Kate hadn’t died so early, Stiles might be that woman on the floor, an emissary without a pack, a woman with nothing in her heart but vengeance. 

She reaches Julia’s side, picks up the dropped dagger.

Behind her, the doors bang open and the Argents enter, armed to the teeth, followed by the Sheriff, gun in hand.

Third wave. 

Stiles raises the dagger. 

“It’s over,” Julia breathes, something like relief, or maybe it’s triumph, in her gaze. 

Stiles nods. _Almost._

Scott calls Allison’s name in surprise just as the pack falls silent, as Stiles’ dad sees her moving and yells for her to stop. 

“Stiles! What are you - !”

She drives the dagger home. 

Julia gasps, hands going to where the weapon is buried in her heart, but her eyes never leave Stiles’. 

“Monster,” she whispers, but it’s recognition more than accusation. 

At the end of it all, they’re two peas in a fucking pot.

“Yeah,” Stiles agrees as her own power returns to her in a flood of light and heat, setting her insides on fire and her blood boiling as she faints.

It’s over. 

+

“I can’t… I can’t do this, Stiles. The vampires, that was… but you killed that woman. She was defenceless and hurt and you _killed her_. I should arrest you!”

There’s no body, though, and no evidence. They made sure of that, with the help of Allison and Chris.

There is nothing but what the Sheriff saw and what he saw – 

\- there is a reason his daughter keeps dreaming of fire and her hands full of matches. There is a reason she tries not to look him in the eye too often, and it’s the same reason she killed the darach, the reason she gets along with Peter, the reason she is her pack’s enforcer, their shield and sword.

“I love you, Daddy,” she says and when she tries to hug him, he flinches. 

+

Derek brokers a treaty with the Argents, under the aegis of Allison as the new matriarch. 

Mutual aid, mutual support. 

Protection for Beacon Hills from all it draws.

Scott can’t stop smiling, even though they leave again after a week.

+

The twins stay. Ethan gave up their shared alpha powers to save Aiden and Peter used the open channels to weave them into the pack, even before they swore loyalty.

Stiles likes them.

Cora tries to stick around, but she has a pack in South America that means more to her than the shattered fragments of a family she lost when she was nine. 

After three months, Derek sends her off. She promises to return in the summer and Stiles never asks if she’s lying. 

+

“Are you sure about this, sweetheart?” the tattoo artist asks, needle poised over the pulse point of her left hand. “There’s no hiding this.”

Stiles nods, twining her finger’s with Derek’s, letting him pull her pain away as soon as it starts. 

Protection on her left wrist, fire on her right, and the phases of the moon down her spine, her link to the pack, to Erica, who loved to run, to Boyd, who howled at the moon with an abandon he never showed in daylight.

She doesn’t show her dad, doesn’t have to. 

She hasn’t been home in three weeks and more and more of her things keep showing up at the pack house, brought by a sheepish Isaac, a regretful Scott, or a fierce Lydia. 

Eyes closed, she listens to the buzz of the needle, to the power ebbing and flowing inside of her, to her pack, tethered to the core of her.

“Sure,” she says, belatedly.

+

Some nights, Stiles dreams of fire and all her pack dead.

Those nights, she pads barefoot out of the bedroom and finds Peter, who never seems to sleep, reading in the living room. She snuggles into his side and he plays with her hair. 

They don’t talk, just sit there, surrounded by each other’s warmth and Stiles can feel herself go numb, against the fear, the nightmares, the heartache. It all dulls until she can breathe again.

Derek finds her in the morning, kisses her awake silently and when she blinks up at him like an idiot, he smiles.

She stops making lists of her losses, starts charting her victories instead, the things she has, the things she keeps. She writes _Good Things_ at the top of a sheet of stationary and sticks it to the fridge with big, bright magnets. Every now and then, a word, a phrase, a name will show up, in her handwriting, or that of someone else. 

“You’re a bunch of pussies,” Jackson decides, the first time he sees the list, but there’s Lydia’s name in his choppy copperplate at the bottom of the sheet, beneath Ethan’s _safety_ and Aiden’s _Ethan_ , and they all know it. 

Sometimes they strike things out. Sometimes they howl at the moon and no-one howls back. Sometimes Lydia screams.

Life goes on. 

+

+

**Author's Note:**

> Come yell at me on my [Tumblr](wordsformurder.tumblr.com). 
> 
> And if you're not into yelling, just tell me what you think in a comment. Please.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Merope](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13644729) by [RsCreighton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RsCreighton/pseuds/RsCreighton)




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